Mark Sennen - Touch

I had to leave.

Now he had guessed why Trinny had left, dirty girl.

I was assaulted by your father. Raped. I was a young woman, a girl.

Exactly. Dirty.

So why are you still chasing after us?

He wanted what he had back then. He wanted the closeness of the flesh without the perversion of desire.

You’ve got a funny way of showing it.

That was because they were all sluts. He couldn’t help himself.

Looney tunes, Harry.

Yes, a lunatic. Trinny had it about right, Harry reckoned. But he was right too. He couldn’t help himself because madness was like a one-way street. Once you had started down it you couldn’t turn around or else you would smash into the oncoming traffic. He thought about this as he busied himself laying a fire in the front room. He wanted it warm for later. For Lucy. Then he thought about Emma. Up there in the room all alone. He hoped she was OK. And, because he was thinking of what was upstairs, he thought of THEM. They lived upstairs too. In the attic. How appropriate. He gave them water and some stale bread a few times a week, but they didn’t have much of a life. They must be cold and frightened and in the deepest despair imaginable.

The thought lifted his mood. He felt happy and quite content. He struck a match and the fire burst into life, darting yellow and orange, little popping sounds coming from the kindling. The room began to warm and his mind turned to Emma once again. He hoped she was the one.

She isn’t, Harry. You know that.

It wouldn’t matter. There were plenty more out there.

Only two left, Harry.

Two would be enough if Emma didn’t work out. Still, he wished Trinny hadn’t reminded him the project was finite.

And where will you find them?

The same place he had found Trinny. And Lucy and Emma.

And Carmel?

Carmel, yes, but she never had a chance, she became Mitchell’s girl.

Unlucky for her.

And unlucky for him as well because he didn’t like things dying. Especially not things he loved. When things died they didn’t stay around anymore and that was sad. The tabby cat he killed when he was a child had rotted away until there had been nothing left to touch, nothing to speak to either. Now he knew he could preserve things by taking pictures of them, but you would have to be crazy to speak to an image and you couldn’t touch it either. You needed three dimensions for that. Luckily he had found a way to keep the girls, and if Emma didn’t prove to be the one then at least she could stay for a while and have some fun. She wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t say a word. Not one.

Derriford Hospital, Plymouth. Monday 1st November. 9.00 am

Forester’s post-mortem was scheduled for first thing Monday morning but Savage lost no sleep over it. The jaunt on the moor on Thursday combined with Saturday night’s late shift had left her shattered. Not to mention that she had spent the whole of Sunday trying to keep Samantha and Jamie entertained. The day had been fun, but she hadn’t had any time to relax.

Doctor Nesbit emerged from his office in his green robes, bright eyes glinting as if he couldn’t wait to get started. He spotted Savage leaning against a wall and sent her and Enders away to fuel up on coffee and buns while he and his assistant prepared for the PM. The coffee came strong, black and acrid, but the iced buns tasted lovely and when she returned the combined caffeine and sugar rush had heightened her senses to beyond the point she had wished for. The stench from the morgue lingered in the air, despite the whirr of the extractors, and not for the first time in her life Savage remembered the fact that all odour was particulate based.

Nesbit greeted them in a contemplative mood.

‘I have hypothesised a direct correlation between the number of times I encounter you chaps each month and the state of British society. Recently I find myself wondering if things aren’t getting a little bit worse.’

Nesbit moved over to the body of David Forester, or rather the remains of Forester, for the heap of skin and bones didn’t resemble a man in any meaningful way. The body had been up on the rock for weeks and the sun, wind and rain had been hard at work. Not to mention the crows and other scavengers. Bits of flesh hung on bleached white bones and the grin on the face and the staring empty eye sockets looked like something from a zombie movie. Under the glare of the lights and before a small, select audience, Forester prepared to make his final performance.

After the discovery on Caglin Tor they’d had no time to contemplate the scene. The wind had picked up even more and the snow fell in large flakes. Campbell said they should head back before the weather got even worse. Savage had noted the state of the body and little else. Not until the next day, when John Layton called, had the full horror of what Forester had been through become apparent.

‘Chained round the neck to the rock. Handcuffs behind the back. Not a scrap of clothing on him. I’m not doing the pathologist’s job but I’d stake my pension on him having been alive up there at some point.’

Layton had said they had found faeces on the rock beneath the body and what appeared to be urine stains too.

‘So you think he starved to death? Or died of thirst?’ Savage had asked.

‘Luckily for him I reckon the exposure got him before he reached that point. Hypothermia, I’d say. Death would have been a relief.’

Looking at the body now, lying half-curled on the post-mortem table, hands still cuffed behind the back, Savage wondered if Forester had died in the same position. Alive a thug, but dying like a baby in the womb. She thought the tableau in front of her showed a sort of poetic justice, but she couldn’t quite figure how

Nesbit peered into the chest cavity and prodded about between the ribs with a long pair of forceps.

‘Not much of interest for us, Charlotte. All the internal organs are gone or virtually so. My job here is more like archaeology than pathology.’

‘No chance of testing if he had been drugged then?’

‘Not today, no. We’ll open up his skull in a moment and get a peek at what’s left. Not that there will be much I would think.’

Nesbit poked his forceps into the left eye socket and bent over to look right inside.

‘Hah! Something the crows didn’t get at least.’ He uttered a cry of delight and withdrew the forceps. Clasped in the end was a small, clear and shrivelled piece of plastic. ‘Contact lens.’

The lab assistant held out a dish and Nesbit dropped the lens in.

‘Not that it tells us anything, I am afraid.’

‘Except he was short-sighted,’ Enders said.

‘Does that help?’

‘In fact I suppose it could be helpful,’ Savage said. ‘The lens tells us he may have been out and about when he was kidnapped. He wouldn’t wear contacts while asleep and depending on his prescription he might not have worn them at home.’

‘Now then.’ Nesbit was making a second pass over the body. ‘What is this?’ He pointed down at the left leg where the flesh and muscle had rotted away to leave nothing but bone.

Savage moved closer than she wanted to and saw a line where the bone was broken.

‘Observe.’ Nesbit tapped his forceps on both sides of the leg. ‘Both tibia and fibula are fractured.’

‘RTC?’

‘Common when a pedestrian is hit by a vehicle, yes. As to whether the break is a result of a road traffic accident…’

Nesbit was now working his way up the body, examining the other bones one by one.

‘Ah, look at the shoulder.’ He used the forceps to peel back a piece of stringy muscle. ‘The left clavicle is badly broken, smashed even. I can’t see this amount of damage having come from a collision with a car though. If the pedestrian was walking across the road and was hit on the left hand side he would be thrown on the bonnet, or against the front of the car. This injury appears as if inflicted from above.’ Nesbit made a chopping movement down on his own shoulder to illustrate.